The fragmentation that has characterized Italy’s politics since its late-19th-century unification has characterized its cuisine for much longer. Travel around the country and it’s hard not to be floored by the incredible differences in food from one area — sometimes one town — to another. This is especially true in regions as diverse as Emilia-Romagna — home of parmigiano, prosciutto and aceto balsamico, and blessed with good soil, a favorable climate and flat topography — or Sicily, starkly Mediterranean but a place where the strong influences of North Africa and the Middle East created a cuisine that isn’t seen anywhere else in the world.
Talk of subtle gradations in Italian food is even something of a sport among obsessive-compulsive travelers, who might spend hours engaged in friendly one-upmanship over exactly where to find exactly which near-perfect dish. They might have stumbled on the quintessential Neapolitan pizza, or an extraordinary linguine with clams at a hole in the wall in Rome, or the best farinata in Genoa.
Curiously, it’s the country’s most popular tourist region — Tuscany — where the food can be least interesting. Most of the region is landlocked, more extreme in its climate than much of the country, suitable for growing grapes and certainly olives, but not great for extensive agriculture. Historically, the mountainous terrain made trade and communication between villages difficult, limiting the spread of ingredients and of ideas about cooking. So visitors to glorious Firenze eat steak and wonder what’s next.
What’s next is Lucca. Its food is among Italy’s most compelling — almost certainly the best in Tuscany — and the town is a draw in its own right. Enclosed by walls whose broad tops look out over the town’s lovely towers and broad, calm piazzas on one side and park grounds on the other, Lucca may not have the perfectly medieval feeling of Siena, but neither does it have the crowds. Although it gets its share of tourists, it almost never feels overrun.
The difference between food in Lucca and the rest of the region is perhaps best epitomized by one of the town’s most representative dishes, tortelli lucchese. In Italy, you can determine a region’s historical affluence by the dominant type of pasta. Flour and water, perhaps with some oil, produced a bleak-colored pasta made by poor people. Flour with a few eggs, yielding a pale yellow pasta, was the pasta of the not-so-poor. Flour with a lot of eggs — creating a brilliant yellow — was for the wealthy.
Tuscan pasta was almost never made with eggs, which made it closer in spirit to Italy’s south than its north. But Lucca, with banking and a robust silk trade, had money, which explains why its food is better than that in the rest of Tuscany. Not surprisingly, tortelli lucchese is bright yellow pasta, stuffed with seasoned meat and topped with a heavily meat-laden ragu. Talk about rich!
Most restaurants in Lucca offer not only tortelli lucchese but also the other local specialties: a soup of farro (a barleylike grain) with beans; fried everything; rabbit in many forms; and baccala (salt cod). Things have not changed much; the Lucchese remain set in their ways. For the most part, the bread is still unsalted. (If you have never eaten unsalted bread, consider yourself blessed; it’s dull and flat-tasting. Fortunately, many places serve salted focaccia along with it.) And some foods are eaten only one way: My friend Ed Schneider, dining at Ristorante Giglio, started to put lemon on a piece of grilled baccala, and a waiter swooped down on him, grabbed the lemon, and explained that it was there only “for idiots.” Schneider was instructed to eat his salt cod with lots of oil and lots of black pepper, as the locals do.
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